When Warren Buffett or Bill Gates hands over tens of billions of dollars to charitable foundations, Americans may be surprised at how rich the super-rich are, but not that they give their fortunes away. It is commonplace to see plaques in museums, churches, hospitals, art galleries and universities thanking wealthy benefactors and equally ordinary to hear foreign leaders wondering aloud how they can inspire their rich to be less miserly.
The generosity of Andrew Carnegie, the steel tycoon, who was born near the Chancellor’s constituency in Fife, fascinates Gordon Brown. Carnegie emigrated to America in 1848, became the richest man in the world and then handed his money to charitable trusts. ‘Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community,’ Carnegie declared.
You rarely hear British magnates sounding as magnanimous. Richard Branson has promised to invest £1.6bn of Virgin’s profits in renewable energy, but it is often wise with Branson to check the small print. Elsewhere, the rich hang on to their money and the rest of us don’t find their avarice unusual because we don’t have America’s peculiar puritan culture. In God Won’t Save America, his new book on why the dynamism and hypocrisies of the founding fathers led to a society where ‘business is next to divinity’, George Walden writes that their emphasis on charity was America’s saving grace. ‘Implicit in the doctrine of freedom to get rich was the understanding that rich folk have a duty to help the common weal.’
I think Brown is naive to believe he can import the US’s charitable culture like a container of machine tools being flown into Heathrow. But I may be wrong and on Tuesday, an organisation called the Fortune Forum will try to prove that I am by appealing to ‘individuals of extreme wealth’ to empty their bank accounts at a dinner in central London. Five hundred guests, paying £75,000 or more for a table, will hear Bill Clinton, Michael Douglas and ‘aristo-environmentalist’ Zac Goldsmith appeal to them to take ‘personal and individual action against global poverty and environmental degradation’. As they speak, ‘golden goddesses’, glamour pusses in glitzy dresses, will sway through the audience collecting pledges for the British Red Cross, Water Aid and African Renaissance.
The event’s organiser, Renu Mehta, a model turned clothing entrepreneur, chirruped that she had once been a party girl, but then found by ‘talking to my friends, very fortunate individuals like me – captains of industry, celebrities, activists – that we were all feeling the same way. We were looking for the missing ingredient in our lives, an ingredient that could offer personal fulfilment. I’ve since discovered this only comes with the serenity of giving something back’.
I have to confess to a prejudice here. Short of being locked up in the nonces’ wing of Brixton prison, I can’t think of a worse way to spend an evening than being stuck in the company of ‘aristo-environmentalists’ and ageing actors as they try to find serenity in an orgy of competitive compassion.
Which isn’t to say that the Fortune Forum won’t do good. Conceivably, the ‘individuals of extreme wealth’ could raise tens or hundreds of millions for people who need the money and it would feel perverse to criticise them if it wasn’t for the influence of religion on the new charitable movement. Not the ferocious moral earnestness of New England Protestantism, but the sloppy and occasionally sinister hodgepodge of new age mumbo jumbo which provides what passes for spirituality for so many of the modern wealthy.
One of the highlights of the evening will be a video address by Deepak Chopra, a fashionable Californian guru who has become very rich by condemning materialism. ‘He’s going to bring the message that we need a culture of peace,’ one of the organisers explained to me. ‘A lot of poverty is caused by war.’ Indeed it is and among the causes of the poverty brought by war is religion. Which makes it strange that Chopra will speak on the need for his listeners to purge their minds of thoughts of violence and hatred and be followed on the stage by Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens.
The organisers boast that this will be Stevens’s first concert in 27 years. They forget to mention that when he converted to Islam, he upheld peace and tolerance by supporting the murder of Salman Rushdie. So notorious did his backing for Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa become that when Rushdie came out of hiding he reprised a Cat Stevens number and sighed: ‘I’ve been followed by a moon shadow.’
If you go to the www.fortuneforum.org website, you will notice that none of the admirable charities it supports is dedicated to fighting poverty by spreading human rights, including the right of men and women to speak freely. The uncharitable could think that today’s aristos have as little interest in the freedoms democracy brings as their predecessors.
Balls’s benevolence to the Brethren smacks of sectarianism
I admit that stories about the Exclusive Brethren and ‘Alternatively Secured Pensions’ may not leap out of the pages at you, but they still provide a cautionary tale of how not to govern a multi-faith society.
The Brethren is one of the most extreme of the Protestant sects. Its members face the humiliation of excommunication if they are caught reading newspapers, listening to the radio, watching the television, accessing the internet or sharing their driveways with non-believers. When they retire, they aren’t allowed to buy an annuity. That would involve betting on the date of their death and gambling is forbidden, as you might expect.
No one can accuse Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s deputy, of pandering to an interest group when it lobbied him because, along with everything else, Brethren members aren’t allowed to vote. With apparent altruism, he decided to change the law to allow them to receive an income from their pension fund after they had reached 75 and not force them to buy an annuity like everyone else.
Now the Treasury is horrified that all kinds of pensioners who have never heard of the Brethren are taking advantage of the loophole. It is trying to stop them by insisting that the government only meant the benefits to go to members of the sect.
It may seem a small point, but the Treasury can’t be allowed to get away with a law which discriminates by creed. If we are going to cope with the stresses of multiculturalism, the state has to be above sectarian conflict and treat all people as equal citizens. This, in brief, is the argument against faith schools; the sooner the government grasps it, the more trouble it will avoid.
Clarkson – what a knock-out bloke
It’s a tough life presenting Top Gear and not only for Richard Hammond. The first time I met Jeremy Clarkson, he explained that he had a bandage round his knuckles because Piers Morgan had been running stories in the Mirror that falsely implied he was having an affair. Clarkson was angry. His wife was angrier still and had taken to reaching for the pots and pans with a dangerous look in her eyes. The night before, at an awards ceremony, a leering Morgan boasted that he was going to destroy him. ‘I thought: do I ignore him or do I hit him? I hit him. He went down and before he could lay a finger on me, panicking Mirror executives had pulled him away shouting, “Break it up, Piers.”‘
On behalf of hundreds of journalists, I lunged forward and shook Clarkson warmly by the hand.
‘Aarrgghhh!’ he screamed.
Save me from the super-rich and their competitive compassion
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Nick Cohen
